Bing had been continuously innovating its search algorithms for its decision engine to compete in the search market, striving to bring a more personalized and natural search experience to users. Today the Bing team announced that they are rolling out a new feature called Adaptive Search.

So what is Adaptive Search? Here’s an example the Bing team provided:

As an example, let’s say you’re in the process of planning a vacation – you might decide to search for “Australia”. In this case, you’re most likely to be looking for websites specifically about the country Australia, or information about travel. You can see an example of the search “Australia”, for someone who is planning a vacation, on the left image below.

Now suppose, instead, you’re a movie-buff and are trying to decide on a movie to rent for the evening. With this context, the smart technology powering this feature will infer that you’re probably looking for the movie “Australia”, and begin to adapt the search page to your intent by showings results relevant to the movie Australia higher up on the page than they were previously, as shown on the right image below.

The differences are generally quite subtle, but the more confidence we have about what your intent is, the more personalized the results will become. We certainly don’t want to make any assumptions that prevent you from seeing a diverse set of results and lock you into a “filter bubble”, so the results that correspond to differing intents (e.g. travel to Australia) will still be available to you on the page.

To learn more about the new feature, you can also check out the video below: